Date: Wed, 14 Feb 1996 13:09:30 -0500 (EST) From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu> Subject: Fascist candidates? Louis: Pat Buchanan said yesterday to 250 reporters, "New Hampshire, like every other part of American, feels that sense of economic security, economic stress. They are suffering, too, from wages that seem to go down as the Dow Jones hits 5000." Some l*st members interpret such rhetoric as "fascist". Meanwhile, Bob Dole has jumped on the populist bandwagon. He said yesterday that "Corporate profits are setting records and so are corporate layoffs. The bond market finished a spectacular year. But the real average hourly wage is 5 percent lower than it was a decade ago. Two years ago, family earnings were hit with the largest tax increase in the history of America." Is Dole now playing with fascism? As for Clinton, he is cited in the latest Nation magazine as having been responsible for more anti-labor policies than any President since Eisenhower or something to that effect. The pantload from Arkansas runs as a Reagan type, grinning at the cameras, saying things like "The economy is doing just fine--all we have to do is fine-tune it a bit." So what is Clinton? Another fascist for kow-towing to Wall St.? A liberal? Isn't it entirely possible that bourgeois politics utilizes themes in a demagogic manner that have only the most tenuous connection to the class-struggle. Yesterday, Dole was a rock-ribbed Republican who catered his message to the Republican Party's traditional base: country-club members, corporate vice-presidents and assorted Babbits. Then he re-fashions himself as a populist. This effort is simply a mechanism to get votes. When we talk about fascism, we must talk about fascist *movements* otherwise it is very easy to get lost in the woods. --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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